New rules will slow up the planning system and cause many more decisions to be taken on appeal

Possible consequences of the draft planning framework

7:00AM BST 21 Sep 2011

SIR – The current acrimonious and confrontational arguments over the National Planning Policy Framework tell us that the same words can bear widely different interpretations.

These arguments are a foretaste of what we can expect in our neighbourhoods as every development is fought over.

At the moment around 80 per cent of all developments are approved. If nobody can agree on what the NPPF actually means we could end up with a slower, more expensive planning system in which many more decisions are taken on appeal.

Just six weeks before the draft NPPF was published, the Natural Environment White Paper was issued; this seems to have come from a different government altogether. The White Paper promised that “through reforms of the planning system, we will take a strategic approach to planning for nature within and across local areas. This approach will guide development to the best locations, encourage greener design and enable development to enhance natural networks.”

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This pledge is ignored by the Government’s planning proposals. We urge the Government to address this policy dysfunction, revise the NPPF and do what they undertook to do but have failed to do – promote sustainable development.

A sustainable future requires both grey and green infrastructure (parks, drainage, urban trees) and an intelligent way of deciding what goes where. The NPPF does not take us very far towards a better way of achieving this.

Jo Watkins President, Landscape Institute London WC1

SIR – The only people who will benefit from this appalling document will be, as usual, the lawyers.

Derek Thornton Crook, Co Durham

SIR – Charles Tucker says the planning reforms will put communities at increased risk of flooding (Letters, September 20). In fact, the existing planning system already facilitates dangerous development on flood plains.

Planning Policy Statement 25 – Planning and Flood Risk sets out how local authorities must consider the risk of flooding in planning decisions. But even if the Environment Agency advises against the development, advice can be ignored. The only justification required is that there are “no reasonably available sites”.

Flood defences are also no longer decided on and funded by the Environment Agency. The Government now encourages match funding from the private sector for flood protection measures.

This means the local authority gets its flood defences if development goes ahead, the developer builds on the flood plain and everyone is happy – apart from residents and businesses downstream of the development that are more likely to be flooded as flood plain storage is built on.There should be a tighter presumption against development on flood plains, not the reverse.

David Symons London WC2

SIR – Building on the flood plain is unwise, and so is building on an adjacent hillside, as the run-off can increase the risk of flash flooding.

Near us, a need for eight homes over 10 years morphed into a plan for 68 homes and a cemetery below the spring line.

Roger Smith Shefford, Bedfordshire

SIR – Flood defence work to enable houses to be built on flood plains ruins our rivers, turning them into ditches in some cases.

I regularly fish the Great Ouse, and have been in a battle with the Environment Agency over low water levels since the last round of flood defence work was carried out. Hands off our rivers too!

Tony Dilley St Ives, Cambridgeshire

High pay and growth

SIR – Your leading article (“We need growth, not posturing, Mr Cable”, September 20) is right to imply that boardroom salaries are not the number one priority for economic growth. But, as a member of the Treasury select committee, I would suggest that executive pay, corporate governance and economic growth are intimately connected.

Politicians should be resolute in distinguishing between crony capitalism and the capitalism of real entrepreneurship and risk-taking that will prove the key to our economic recovery. Too often it is crony capitalism that is setting the wrong economic and cultural incentives for British business.

Median total pay for FTSE 100 chief executives has risen by more than 400 per cent in the past 12 years. Yet the performance of those companies has done little to justify these huge returns.

Why? One key reason is that, as my pamphlet Compassionate Economics argued in 2008, they are poorly owned. Good, effective and long-term ownership is the essence of real capitalism. We have a system that rewards short-term thinking, positional gains and corporate gigantism.

I disagree with Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, on many things. But in focusing on effective corporate governance, and its centrality to economic growth, he is right.

Jesse Norman MP (Con) Hereford

SIR – As a supporter of the Government, I hope Mr Cable’s grasp of economics is better than his grasp of history. He seemed to refer to Tory colleagues (report, September 20) as “ideological descendants of those who sent children up chimneys”.

In fact, the Climbing Boys Act was passed by Disraeli’s administration in 1875, in the best traditions of Tory social reform. It is Mr Cable’s political ancestors who wanted to perpetuate this type of child labour.

As I was standing in front of the same painting at the Tate, Light Red Over Black (1957), a guard said: “You know what that is, don’t you: two burned pieces of toast on strawberry jam.”

Colin Streeter Nutley, East Sussex

Shifting the travellers

SIR – It is irrelevant that the offenders being evicted from Dale Farm for building without planning permission are travellers (report, September 20). They could be doctors or farmers – the issue is simply one of not complying with society’s laws.

We should not let miscreants hide behind the smokescreen of a mystical travellers’ right. Anyone creating mess, noise and distress to people nearby in legitimately built properties should be evicted.

We should look closely at a legal system that forces a council to spend so much time and money enforcing a clear-cut matter such as breached planning rules.

Catherine Farrell Newcastle upon Tyne

SIR – Just how far have the travellers at Dale Farm travelled in the past 10 years?

Brian Ball Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire

Give Platonov his due

SIR – Tim Martin, in his fine article about the adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s book Life and Fate for Radio 4 (Review, September 17), quotes me as saying that people seem to need there to be “a one and only” great Soviet writer, and that this “used to be Solzhenitsyn, and now it seems to be becoming Grossman”.

Unfortunately, he omits what I said next: that Grossman had two great contemporaries – Varlam Shalamov, and Andrey Platonov. It is Platonov whom most Russian writers and critics now see as their greatest writer of the last century.

I translated Life and Fate more than 25 years ago. Only now is the novel becoming recognised. My wife and I have translated several volumes of Platonov’s novels and stories. I hope that Platonov, too, will not have to wait 25 years before receiving his due in the English-speaking world.

I also hope that a complete translation of Varlam Shalamov’s stories about the Gulag will soon be commissioned. Shalamov remains greatly undervalued.

Robert Chandler London W14

Drying hands in peace

SIR – Rather than a nut chopper (Letters, September 20), a far more useful invention would be a silent hand-dryer. I prefer to leave my hands wet than use these intolerably noisy gadgets.

David R. Boswell Timsbury, Somerset

There must be a simpler way to sell train tickets

SIR – Why are train companies allowed such complex ticket arrangements (report, September 20)? They know which trains run and when. They know how many seats there are and how many it will take standing.

Why can’t they sell tickets as theatres do: if you can’t get on, you have to get the next one.

Steve Hyde Leicester

SIR – The lack of co-ordination of trains, buses and ferries at Lymington, which Keith Chambers notes (Letters, September 16), points to a failing of the privatisation principle. A transport minister in the Eighties, referring to bus privatisation, said that the new companies should not seek to run a combined timetable with British Rail because that would be anti-competitive.

In how many towns – Crewe and Cambridge are examples – are the bus and rail stations so remote from each other that co-ordination would be impossible?

Any government capable of kicking the transport industry into a standardised national timetable, from air and sea terminals to the local bus, would win votes.

Mike Downing Winsford, Cheshire

SIR – People are confused about the basic train ticket types, and if they buy the wrong one, pleading ignorance won’t help them if they meet a ticket inspector.

The Association of Train Operating Companies must start acting in passengers’ interests – if they won’t, the Government will have to step in.